By Bev PechanThe
great broodmare and dam of champions, Casey’s Charm, died at age 25,
November 23, 2003. Remembered by many as the dam of Kristie Peterson’s
barrel whiz “ Bozo,” Casey’s Charm produced a total of 14 foals – many
of which made a name for themselves, their owners and the Loiseau
family breeding program: one that has selectively concentrated on
maintaining a top broodmare band with the goal of raising outstanding
performance horses.

Casey’s
Charm, whose maternal genes earned nearly $3 million in barrels, arena
and sales, was a 1978 blaze-faced chestnut mare, who stood only about
14.2, said Lis (Loiseau) Hollmann, who was caring for the mare at the
time of her death and had swapped ownership with her mother, Frances
Loiseau, a couple of times. She was sired by the stallion Tiny Circus,
campaigned by Tim McQuay in the Twin Cities area. Her dam, Casey’s
LadyLove, was by Casey’s Poco, and it was this mare that began the
Loiseau dynasty of quarter horses. All of the horses in the Loiseau
program are descendants of Casey’s LadyLove.

What
attracted Frances Loiseau to the appendix two-year-old at a Minnesota
auction in the first place? “I liked her color … she had a nice head
and a big rear end, even at that age,” Frances Loiseau said. She and
her husband, Jim, had inspected the filly before the sale, but he
wasn’t sitting with her when the youngster came into the ring. Frances
bid, and won Casey’s LadyLove for a little over $700 – a high price
for an unproven animal in 1963. When Jim returned to the bleachers,
Frances recalled, she told him she had purchased the filly. “Good for
you,” he said. Casey’s LadyLove was rich in Poco Bueno blood, and was
a “sweet, gentle mare,” Frances said. Her daughter, Barbara, would
also race her. “If she ran last, she could pick up the slack – she
never got hot,” Frances said of the mare’s calm nature. Her breeder,
Virgil Ningen, raised top western pleasure horses – including a full
sister, Our Goldie, who was an AQHA Supreme Halter Mare.

“Mom thought she (Casey’s LadyLove) was
the most beautiful mare she ever saw,” daughter Lis said. “She had
incredible speed” … “she was open one year after eight or ten colts
and we rodeoed on her. All summer we goat-tied, [we] headed on her …
she was a flag horse. She loved to work cattle,” she said.

“Casey’s LadyLove’s daughters were good
producers,“ Lis said. Frenchman’s Lady produced Frenchman’s Guy, owned
by Bill and Deb Myers of St. Onge, South Dakota. The palomino
stallion, whose get have won nearly half a million dollars to date,
was the nation’s number one Barrel Futurity Sire in 2001 and stood
number five in the nation in 2002 as a top sire of barrel horses.

Tiny Circus was successfully shown in
the region, and was a son of Tiny Watch by Anchor Watch (TB), and out
of Circus Bars, who traced to Clabber. “He was a race horse and a
Supreme Champion, both women recalled. “He was a rangy, longer horse,“
Frances noted. From the mating of Casey’s LadyLove to Tiny Circus came
Casey’s Charm, born the year after Jim Loiseau passed away.
Frances would continue on with their dream of raising good
performances horses, but she decided early on to concentrate on doing
this through the best mare program she could put together. After my
husband died, I never considered having a stallion around the place,”
she said. “Mares are a lot easier to handle … and there were good
stallions within 200 miles.”

A friendship with the late Pat Cowan
became a hand-shake partnership in breeding and selling outstanding
prospects. The Laughing Boy AA cross to the Loiseau mares was a good
niche, and the Sun Frost cross with Casey’s Charm resulted in a couple
of chapters in horse history: French Flash Frost, a 1986 sorrel
gelding, has won over $50,000 in team roping and barrels, and his 1987
full brother French Flash Hawk – or “Bozo” – brought the world to
attention when the speedy sorrel and Kristie Peterson rode to four
WPRA World Championships and two Reserve WPRA World Championships –
and then garnered the title of AQHA/PRCA Barrel Racing Horse of the
Year five times!

Frances
credits Kristie with bringing Bozo full circle. “We’ve been very
lucky. The horses have to have the ability,” she said, “but it takes
the right person to bring it out.” Frances also said that though she
is often credited with being the owner of Bozo at his birth, the honor
actually belongs to Lis. Lis and her husband, John, bought Casey’s
Charm as a four-year-old from her mother in 1984. In 1990, they gave
the mare back to Frances as a Christmas gift, but the Hollmans brought
her and other mares to their Hot Springs ranch in the mid-1990s.

Casey’s Charm was a mare that didn’t
really care for people (she was always a broodmare), Lis said, but in
later years, she would consent to bring her newest baby up to
introduce it to you. “She was the boss-mare,” Lis said. “All her colts
had that edge that she had as a young horse,” she said. She was a
“fabulous mother.”

Lis recalled that Casey’s Charm’s first
few foals had an allergy to her milk – including Bozo. Surprisingly,
she would permit humans to handle her baby until it was thriving, and
she seemed to know when that time was. “Casey’s Charm was in her
‘aloof’ state,” Lis said, but she would allow us to doctor it. “When
it was getting better, she’d get between them and the colt as if to
say – ‘I’ll
take it from here!’”

Other sons and daughters of Casey’s
Charm are: Frenchman’s Dox Dakota, the 2001 WPRA Badlands Circuit
Champion, South Dakota State 4H Rodeo Champion and four-time qualifier
for the SDRA Finals; Boon Dox Charm, a 1990 mare in barrel competition
is now a broodmare; PC Frenchman’s Lisbet, premier brood mare whose
2003 palomino stud colt sold for $75,000 at the Hunt Fall Sale; PC
Frenchman ’s Chris, WPRA/NBHA barrel contender; Frenchman’s Mark, 1994
palomino stallion, standing at stud; Frenchman’s Hayday, 1995 palomino
stallion selling for $65,000; PC Frenchman, brought $200,000 at a
Cowan sale; Frenchman’s Fabulous, the 1998 palomino who sold as a
weanling for $30,000 and again as a five-year-old for $50,000; and
Frenchman’s Cabaret, who
brought
$39,000 as a weanling. Her first foal, Racy Casey Jay, and her 1988
mare, Frenchman’s
Hooligan, the latter owned by Mike and Cindy Loiseau, are deceased,
though they have daughters and a stallion from her. Four offspring
were not campaigned due to injury.

Of the four still-living daughters of
Casey’s Charm, two are in the Loiseau/Hollmann breeding program. Four
of her sons are standing at stud. The success of the Loiseau/Hollmann
efforts are the result of careful attention to the characteristics of
the bloodlines that they select for their goal of raising the best
horse possible. “ We use racing bloodlines for speed,” Frances says,
“and cross them with cow horse breeding for versatility.”

Besides selling the top horse at the
Hunt sale – Firewater Frenchman, the $75,000 weanling who went to Gary
Westergren of Lincoln, Nebraska, Lis and John also sold the top mare,
Frenchman’s Randy Rae, a 2001 model for $30,000 and the top-selling
stallion, Special Frenchman, also a 2001 colt for $22,000. (See the
December 2003 issue of Today’s Horse for complete sales information.)
The family earlier was able to buy back See You in Vegas (Frenchman’s
Amazin) who originally sold to Canada, and is now part of the
broodmare band and in foal.

Frenchman’s Vanila, the speedy barrel
futurity champion owned by Rapid City’s Andrea Peterson and ridden by
granddaughter, Carissa Shearer, is one example of the royal bloodlines
of Frenchman performance-bred mares carrying into succeeding
generations. And the modern lines of these mares are serving to
bring some of the old foundation breeding back into the mix. Kenny
Nichols of Waco, Texas, was the buyer of Frenchman’s Fabulous. The
Nichols family owned the immortal sires
Clabber and Driftwood. Kenny told Lis recently that he was thrilled to
have this son of Casey’s Charm with his crosses to Clabber through her
and her dam, Casey’s LadyLove. When his family had Clabber, they
thought they’d never see his equal, Nichols said. But with Frenchman’s
Fabulous, … ”it’s like bringing it home again,” he said.

“A year ago at this time, a man called
me from Brazil,“ Lis said. “He was bringing a multiple embryo transfer
clinic to the United States for the first time and was selecting 20
mares for the program. He wanted Casey’s Charm.” She was still
ovulating, but the family decided against it. Still, “we were
flattered anybody in Brazil had heard of her … he said he had heard
Casey’s Charm had ‘cannon bones to dream about.“ … “She never took a
lame step in her life,” Lis said.

Casey’s Charm takes her well-deserved
rest on a favorite hill where she can “see all the way to Nebraska.”
Her caretaker, Cathy Mallery, takes a handful of oats to her grave
daily, telling Lis that “now she doesn’t have to eat senior anymore.”

And Casey’s Charm made one last
concession to her people. As Cathy left the mare’s stall near the end
of her 100 human years, she softly whinnied after her, as though to
say “Maybe you weren’t so bad after all.”